To increase the safety of vehicle occupants, more and more functions are being integrated into the seats of vehicles, these functions being controlled and monitored electronically on the chassis side. Among these functions, in addition to the monitoring and triggering of airbags integrated in the seats, are also queries concerning seat occupancy and seat belt buckles, as well as child-seat detection for the optimal triggering of occupant restraint systems.
In general, data is transmitted in vehicles by bus systems via cable. This type of data transmission has proven itself. However, for vehicle seats, there is the problem that if the seats are mounted on rails allowing movement on the chassis of the vehicle, the cables must be tracked during a movement of the seat. In addition, the cables should be installed so that they cannot be damaged, and they should present no danger of stumbling for the occupants of the vehicle. The disassembly of the seats presents another problem. For this, particularly for vehicle types such as vans or sports utility vehicles (SUV) whose passenger compartment should be easily variable, the cable connection must be releasable via an easily accessible plug connection, and the cables and plugs remaining on the chassis side must be stowed away in the vehicle floor.
It has already been proposed to transmit data between a chassis and a seat in a cable-less manner using a transformer, the coupling of the seat to the chassis for the data transmission being effected via the iron core of the transformer, and the primary winding and secondary winding of the transformer being fixedly joined to the chassis and the seat, respectively.
For easy disassembly of the seat, the iron core of the transformer has a two-part design. One half of the iron core is positioned on a slide gliding in a guide rail, and the other half of the iron core is positioned on the seat which glides via the slide in the guide rail attached to the chassis. After the seat has been mounted on the slide, the two iron-core halves of the transformer are positioned relative to each other for the inductive data transmission and/or energy transmission, the one half of the iron core being able to glide with the slide in the guide rail during a movement of the seat.
To reduce the overall depth of the guide rail and for easy and inexpensive assembly, it is proposed that the primary winding of the transformer be formed as a line along the guide rail, the line being installed on a base in the guide rail so that the two yoke sections of the iron-core half arranged on the slide may be guided along it during a movement of the seat.
In the system described, because of the coupling of the iron-core halves, the opening in the upper region of the guide rail must be widened, which as a rule results in turning away from current catching or locking systems.